ILPC 2026

 The paper develops the category of 'organisation of labour' in order to analyze how labour productive and reproductive processes take place in the city of Rio Grande, southern Brazil. Such category reflects the appropriation of traditional Labour Process Theory (LPT) authors (Braverman, 1981; Marx, 1996) to analyze the particularities of workers' lives in countries characterized as economical dependents in the world division of work (Marini, 2005), and more specifically in Brazil. The case of Rio Grande is interesting because the shipbuilding industry implemented in the city, under President Lula's government, was advertised as a potentially great cycle of development, capable of bringing social and economical evolution to the city for around fifty years. The shipbuilding industry was one of the many economic cycle the city has undergone throughout all 20^th. Century; it began in 2006, changing the skyline of Rio Grande: ports and shipyards were installed and increased, thousands of immigrants and temporary workers arrived. The perception about the local economy - which used to be qualified as depressed - changed and was promising to flourish through the process started together with the new economic structure and the arrival of workers to the shipyard and shipbuilding. Shipyards installed at the city directed their production, mostly, to Petrobras, a Brazilian state ran oil company. A few of the ships were exported to China. This cycle lasted until 2015. The decreasing of the crude oil barrel price at the global market provoked doubts about financial sustainability of the Petrobras operations for which ships buildt in Rio Grande were demanded. At the same time corruption scandals involving Petrobras and many politicians in the country had been publicized, among them entrepreneurs of the shipyards based in Rio Grande. As a consequence, since 2015 investments to the city are progressively decreasing, thousands of job positions were closed and the economic cycle that potentially would last for fifty years lost its power in less than 10 years. In this context, a qualitative research was held to analyze how the productive and reproductive processes are connected to: accumulation of capital in an extractive economy, the mobilization of workers and their unions, the changing context of the city and in particular with regard to the living conditions that emerged in that context. Appropriating the category 'organization of labour' to primary data collected in shipbuilding industry in Rio Grande allowed us to grasp how life in this city is historically reorganized by capital. The workers from shipbuilding industry, that travel all over the country to find workplaces, are the greatest example of how accumulation of capital determines life in the city. Living apart from their families and their homeland, these workers suffer the pressure for intensifying their production and increasing surplus value even putting in risk even their survival. Filthy accommodations, cultural struggle with their temporary city and other colleagues - together with the over-exploitation of labour - reinforce their condition as a mere productive resource. For capitalists, they differ from the machines only in quantitative terms, not qualitatively.